Let's assume that I have a vector, say vectorA=[1,2,3,4]. I can rotate vectorA by some angle alpha in some direction so that it becomes vectorB=[6,7,8,9] after the rotation. Given the two vectors, vectorA and vectorB, how can I work out the angle and direction of rotation?
For the angle, that's simple enough: I can use any one of the answers to this question.
For the direction (clockwise/counter-clockwise), I am a little clueless. I know how to do it in 2 dimensions and in 3 dimensions. How do I do this for N dimensions, i.e. 4D and beyond?
Given that earth is perfectly spherical with radius R.
The earth-centric coordinate system E is defined as follows:
The center of this sphere is the origin,
Earth's north pole represents the z-axis.
Latitude 0 and longitude 0 represent x-axis.
Latitude 0 and longitude 90 represent y- axis.
Now at any given latitude, longitude, and altitude, we can make a local coordinate system S whose y-z plane is tangential to earth's surface and z points to the north pole and x points perpendicular to this plane.
I need a 4x4 transformation matrix to transform a 3d point from earth-centric coordinate system E to this local coordinate system S.
Transformation matrix from S to E might be composed as product of matrices:
Shift along X axis by R+Altitude
Rotation about Y-axis by Latitude
Rotation about Z-axis by Longitude
Make inverse of this matrix to get E-S transform
Assuming that earth is spherical, this is actually not that hard.
Spherical coordinates to the rescue (see here)! A sphere can be parametrized by 2 angles (as already mentions in the problem statement). Based on this, you can formulate equations to convert to cartesian coordinates. If you compute the derivative of those equations with respect to both angles, you get equations stating the tangent and bitangent of any point on the sphere. Based on this you can either use the vector pointing from the center to a point on the sphere as the normal or the cross product between tangent and bitangent. Formulations for tangent and bitangents are also given in the link above.
Now you got an orthogonal system for each point on the sphere based on your 3 vectors: tangent, bitangent and normal. The only part that is missing is the translation which is simply the vector pointing from the center to a point on the sphere. Given all the necessary ingredients, you can create a 4x4 matrix from those axes using standard libraries like glm or simply place those vectors as columns of your matrix (don't forget to normalize tangent, bitangent and normal!). Depending if you use row-major or column-major matrices you may need to transpose this matrix.
I have an object rotates around the y axis in 2 dimension image, i want to know the angle of rotation around y axis, if i already have the initial point(X,Y) and the point(X',Y) after rotation.
I have tried to follow the 3 dimension rotation equations (https://www.siggraph.org/education/materials/HyperGraph/modeling/mod_tran/3drota.htm) to evaluate the value of rotation angle no matter the direction of rotation,but i do not know the Z value from the 2 dimension to evaluate the rotation angle from the equations.
I figure out that i can't know the accurate rotation angles because i don't have full information about the location of points after and before rotation , i just have a projection of points(after and before the rotation)(x,y) in 2D image(plan) as "Nico Schertler" said in the comments, so i found an approximate solution which is to map the 2D object to similar 3D model for the same object and simulate the same motion on the 3D object to know approximated information about angles, in my case i want to know the rotation angles of a human head (head pose) so i mapped some 2D head features point to another 3D model and after deep diving into mathematics i got approximated rotation matrix as it shown here (http://www.learnopencv.com/head-pose-estimation-using-opencv-and-dlib/)
I Have the orthographic projection of a unit cube with one of its vertex at origin as shown above. I have the x,y (no z) co ordinates of the projections. I would like to compute the angle of rotation of the plane to get the second orthographic projection from the first one (maybe euler angles??)
Is there any other easy way to compute this?
UPDATE:
Could I use this rotation matrix to get a system of equations in cos, sin angles and the x,y and x',y' and solve them easily? Or is there any easier way to get the angles back? (Am I on the right direction to solve this? )
First method
Use this idea to generate equations:
a1, a2 and a3 are coordinates in the original system, x y are the coordinates you get from the end-result and z is a coordinate you don’t know. This generates 2 equations for every point of the cube. E.g for point 0 with coordinates (-1, -1, 1) these are:
Do this for the 4 front points of the cube and you get 8 equations. Now add the fact that this is a rotation matrix -> the determinant is 1 and you have 9 equations. Solve these with any of the usual algorithms for solving equation systems and you have the transformation matrix. Getting the axis and angle from that is easy via google: http://www.euclideanspace.com/maths/geometry/rotations/conversions/matrixToAngle/
Second method
Naming your points 0, 1, 2, 3 a, b, c, d respectively, you can get the z coordinates of the vectors between them (e.g. b-a) with this idea:
you will still have to sort out if b3-a3 is positive, though. One way to do that is to use the centermost point as b (calculate distance from the center for all points, use the one with the minimal distance). Then you know for sure that b3-a3 is positive (if z is positive towards you).
Now assume that a is (0,0,0) in your transformed space and you can calculate all the point positions by adding the appropriate vectors to that.
To get the rotation you use the fact that you know where b-a did point in your origin space (e.g. (1,0,0)). You get the rotation angle via dot product of b-a and (1,0,0) and the rotation axis via cross product between those vectors.
I am developing a rotate-around-axis algorithm in 3 dimensions. My inputs are
the axis I am revolving around, as a vector from my center point
the center point (obviously)
the angle I wish to rotate around
my current position
I am wondering if there is a way to do this without trigonometry, just with vector operations. Does anyone have a potential solution?
EDIT: Is there a way that I could rotate by pi/4 radians (45 degrees) each time, rather than an inputted angle theta? This might simplify things a bit, I don't know.
Rotations are inherently well-described by and .
It's a handy trick that unit quaternions nicely represent 3-D rotations just as well as (and in some senses, better than) rotation matrices. Converting a rotation by angle about a normal axis where , does require a little bit of trigonometry: .
But from there on it's simple arithmetic.
A quaternion can be directly applied to rotate a vector with , or converted to a rotation matrix .
This is a rotation around the origin, of course. To rotate around an arbitrary point in space, simply translate by to the origin, rotate, then translate by to return.
use matrices: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotation_matrix#Rotations_in_three_dimensions
If this is some sort of dumb homework problem, you can use Taylor Series approximation of the sine/consine functions. Whether or not this "counts" as trigonometry is I guess up for debate. You could then use these values in a rotation matrix or quarternion, if you want to use vector operations.
But again, there's no practical reason to do this.
Are there other techniques that don't use trig functions? Possibly, but there are no know efficient, general (i.e. for arbitrary angles) ways to perform rotations without use of trig functions.
However, based on your edit, you can precompute the sin and cos for a collection of angles you're interested in and store them in a lookup table. You need not be constrained in such a circumstance to π/4 increments, but you can do π/256 or π/1024 increments if you want. Also, you don't need two tables, since cos(θ) = sin(θ+π/2).
From there, you can use any of a number of interpolation methods to include simple rounding, linear interpolation or some sort of polynomial interpolation based on your needs.
You would then use either the matrix or quaternion based transformation to compute the rotated vector.
This will be faster than computing the sin and cos for general angles, though will require some additional space, and there will be an accuracy penalty as well. But if it satisfies your needs...
Theres a cheaper way than matrices, I think ive got it to sum count of adders.
The perimetre box of the vector is as good as an angle, if you step in partitions of the box size. (thats only a binary shift if its a power of 2.)
Then that would be a "box rotate" then just use the side report to give you how far along the diagonal you would be then you can split it up into so many gradients, the circle shape.
Id like to see someone proove that u can rotate without matrices or any trig like that too.
Is it possible to rotate without trigonometry? Yes.
Is it useful to rotate without using trigonometry? Probably not.
The first option is a problem-level solution: Change your coordinate system to spherical or cylindrical coordinates.
Since you rotate around an axis cylindrical coordinates of the form (alpha, radius, x3) will work.
Naming your center point O (for origin) and the point to rotate P, you can get the vector between them v=P-O. You also know the normal vector n of your plane of rotation (the vector you rotate around). With this, you can get the components of v that are parallel and orthogonal to n using a vector projection.
You have the freedom to choose how your new coordinate frame is rotated (relative to your original frame), so you can measure angles from the projection of v onto the plane of rotation. You also have the freedom to choose between degree and radians.
From there, you can now rotate to your heart's content using addition and subtraction.
Using dot(.,.) to denote the scalar product it would look something like this in code
v_parallel = dot(v, n) / dot(n, n) * n
radius = norm(v - v_parallel)
x3 = norm(v_parallel)
new_axis = (v - v_parallel) / norm(v - v_parallel)
P_polar = (0, radius, x3)
# P rotated by 90 degrees
P_polar = (pi/2, radius, x3)
# P rotated by -10 degrees
P_polar = (-pi/36, radius, x3)
However, if you want to change back to a standard basis you will have to use trigonometry again. Hence why I said this approach exists, but may not be too useful in practice.
Another approach comes from the cool observation that you can describe any planar rotation using two reflections along two given axis (represented by two vectors). The plane of rotation is the plane that is spun up by the two vectors and the angle of rotation is twice the angle between the two vectors.
You can reflect a vector using the vector projection from above; hence, you can do the entire process without trigonometry if you know the two vectors (let's call them x1 and x2).
tmp = v - 2 * dot(v, x1) / dot(x1, x1) * x1
v_rotated = tmp - 2 * dot(tmp, x2) / dot(x2, x2) * x2
The problem then turns into finding two vectors that are orthogonal to n and have an enclosing angle of alpha/2. How to do this is specific to your problem. For arbitrary alpha this is again the point where you can't dodge the trigonometry bullet; hence, it is again possible, but maybe not so viable in practice.
With help from Mathematica, it looks like we can rotate a point around a vector without Sin/Cos if you are willing to specify the amount of rotation as a number between -1 and 1, rather than an angle in radians.
The below starts with Mathematica's RotationTransform of a point {x,y,z} around a vector {u,v,w} by c radians (which contains many instances of Cos[c] and Sin[c]). It then substitutes all the Cos[c] with "c" and Sin[c] with Sqrt[1-c^2] (a trig identity for Sin in terms of Cos). Everything is simplified with the assumption that the rotation vector is normalized. The resulting equation produces the rotated point without any trig operations.
Note: as c ranges from -1 to 1 the point will only rotate through half a circle, the other half of the rotation can be achieved by flipping the signs on {u,v,w}.